With President Obama’s re-election, Al Gore’s “24 Hours of Climate Reality” coming up in a week, and the next UN Climate Change Conference starting two weeks later, we are going to be hearing a lot about the so-called consensus among climate experts that our greenhouse gases are causing a climate crisis. Consequently, it is important that climate realists have new, solid “talking points” to rebut this assertion.

Two pieces of evidence are most often cited to support the 97%/consensus argument:

1)A 2010 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (PNAS) by Anderegg et al.

2)A poll conducted in April 2008 by Professor Peter Doran and then-graduate student Margaret R. K. Zimmerman at University of Illinois at Chicago . The survey results were summarized in a paper published in January 2009 in the science journal EOS.Contrary to popular belief, the Anderegg et al study did not poll any experts at all. Instead, the paper’s authors merely evaluated the publication record of scientists they chose to represent two sides in the global warming debate. Because I was personally involved in assembling some of the lists of experts cited by the researchers and so understand the limitations of those lists, I am preparing an article explaining why the Anderegg et al study is not a meaningful indicator of expert opinion about this topic.

The Doran/Zimmerman study, which did poll experts, has been thoroughly debunked by many writers and so there is little point in repeating their criticisms in my writings. However, there are two problems with the study that have received little or no coverage to date. Both of these problems destroy the poll’s credibility as a reliable measure of the stance of climate scientists on the supposed climate crisis and I think it is important that as many people as possible know about this. Consequently, the article I just wrote, which is now on the Web at the links below, about the Doran/Zimmerman study focuses on these two largely unknown points.